The amount and variety of information that can be accessed through a computer continues to increase at an astounding rate. The Internet, in particular, has enabled computer users to access a wide variety of information from other computers located all over the world.
Much of the information accessible via the Internet is organized into hypertext documents, which are typically documents formatted in a language known as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and which are accessed via a segment of the Internet known as the World Wide Web. Hypertext documents typically include one or more embedded “hypertext links” that an end user can select to either jump to different documents, or to jump to different locations within the same document. Each hypertext document typically is identified by the storage location (known as a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)) at which the document is stored, with a hypertext link to a particular document specifying the storage location of that document so that, upon selection of the link, that document may be retrieved.
A wide variety of other information such as text, graphics, video, sound, and animation may be integrated into hypertext documents, and moreover, these documents can be organized into “sites”, typically maintained by a single entity, that collect multiple related documents together in a coherent fashion. Furthermore, due to the immense popularity of the World Wide Web, many private computer networks now also support hypertext documents, as do a number of existing computer operating systems and computer software applications.
A computer program, often referred to as a browser, is typically used to navigate between and through hypertext documents. With a browser, an end user can use a mouse or other pointing device to point and click on links such as highlighted text, images or other user interface components (e.g., buttons) in documents to navigate to different documents and/or to different locations within the same document.
While the point and click interface used to navigate between hypertext documents is exceptionally simple to learn and use, a user typically has little guidance as to where he or she has been, and where he or she should go next. Due to the vast amount of information available on the Internet, it is relatively easy for a user to lose his or her place, or to forget where he or she has previously visited. Also, increases in the amount of available information about a particular topic often results in proportional increases in the amount of useless information about that topic. As a result, it becomes more and more difficult to successfully “separate the wheat from the chaff” and locate useful information on the Internet.
Furthermore, due to excessive traffic on the Internet, as well as to the relatively slow analog phone connections that many users must use to connect to the Internet, a significant amount of time is often spent waiting for hypertext documents to be retrieved from the Internet. Often, while a user waits for a hypertext document to be retrieved, the user cannot view and digest all the information in the hypertext document until document retrieval is complete. As such, the user is often much less productive during document retrieval. Moreover, if it is found out after retrieving a particular hypertext document that the document contains little if any useful information, the user's productivity further drops because the user must often backtrack and look elsewhere for the desired information. This is often a significant source of frustration among many users.
For these reasons, it is desirable to minimize whenever possible the retrieval of useless hypertext documents. However, often the only way of finding out whether a particular hypertext document is useful is to retrieve the document and view its contents. Furthermore, a user must often make a mental note to remind himself or herself that a particular hypertext document is or is not useful. However, if a user forgets that a particular document that he or she has viewed is not useful, the user may needlessly waste time returning to that useless document on a later date.
Many browsers support the use of “bookmarks” (also known as “favorites”), through which a user can maintain a list of favorite sites or documents that a user expects to view in the future. In addition, many browsers support description fields in bookmarks within which a user can store additional text about the bookmarks. Useless hypertext documents, on the other hand, are typically omitted from such lists so that only useful documents are identified. Consequently, a user often cannot rely on lists of bookmarks to determine whether documents are or are not useful.
Many browsers also provide rudimentary indications of whether or not a particular hypertext document has been viewed before. Typically, this is performed by changing the color of a hypertext link to a particular document whenever that document is stored locally on a user's computer by virtue of it having been recently viewed. However, no indication as to any of the contents of a particular document is provided by such. Moreover, many browsers routinely delete unused locally-stored documents from time to time, and thus, a user is typically unable to reliably know whether or not a particular hypertext document has been before.
Many users would likely find it helpful to be able to determine additional information about a particular hypertext document prior to actually retrieving the document, so that the user could potentially decide not to retrieve a potentially useless document. A hypertext link, which can be associated with a text and/or image display representation, can contain some information about the particular document referenced by the link. Moreover, some browsers display a pop-up, or “bubble” window over a display representation of a hypertext link whenever a mouse pointer is moved over the display representation. The bubble window may display, for example, the URL of the hypertext document referenced by the link.
Alternatively, the pop-up window may display an alternate message supplied by the author of the document (e.g., by specifying the message in an “ALT” field in the definition for the hypertext link, which is principally used to display an alternative text message whenever a particular browser is not set up to display images). In this instance, however, the message is directly stored in the hypertext document by the document's author, so the message is likely self-serving to an extent since the author typically wants as many users as possible to take the link. Moreover, the same message will be displayed regardless of when the user views the document, so the user that has previously viewed a document is still likely to later forget whether the document is particularly useful. As a result, conventional uses of pop-up windows do little to assist a user in determining whether the user should retrieve a document of unknown usefulness.
Therefore, a significant need continues to exist for a manner of reducing the amount of wasted time associated with retrieving and viewing hypertext documents. Specifically, a significant need has arisen for an improved manner of supplementing a user's knowledge about a particular hypertext document so that the user can make a more informed determination as to whether that document should be retrieved.